A Contrastive Study Of Multimodal Metaphor In Chinese And American Video Public Service Advertisements From The Perspective Of Conceptual Blending Theory

In recent years,multimodality has grown in popularity in functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics.And in the 1990 s,scholars led by Forceville began to extend the study of conceptual metaphor from a single mode to a multimodal field.Research on multimodal metaphors prove that metaphor,as a basic way of human cognition,exists not only in written modes but also in other modes such as sounds,images,and layouts,which greatly expanded the scope of the study of metaphor.Prior research has found that multimodal metaphors focus primarily on print advertisements,especially commercial advertisements to promote goods,public service advertisements(PSAs)receive relatively little attention.In addition,most studies are based on case studies of one or more advertising instances that appear to be fragmented and unsystematic.As a whole,there are not many studies on multimodal metaphors that focus on a specific category of advertisements,the process of meaning construction is insufficiently systematic,and the comparison between Chinese and American video PSAs is particularly stuffless.The thesis compares the multimodal metaphors of Chinese and American PSAs and selects three major categories of PSAs according to the current situation: traffic safety,environmental protection,and traditional culture promotion.Based on conceptual blending theory and conceptual metaphor theory,this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of multimodal metaphors in three types of video PSAs between China and the United States.The corpus consists of 60 advertisements in mainstream official videos such as i QIYI,Youku and CCTV from 2013 to2022,and 30 advertisements from China and the United States.This study adopts quantitative and qualitative research methods.This thesis focuses on the following three research questions.1.What are the similarities and differences of the distribution of the representation types of multimodal metaphors and multimodal metaphor types in Chinese and American video PSAs?2.How are the meanings of multimodal metaphors constructed in Chinese and American video PSAs from the perspective of conceptual blending theory?3.What are the reasons for the similarities and differences of multimodal metaphors in Chinese and American video PSAs?The results of the study are as following.First,Chinese and American video PSAs are mainly multimodal in their metaphorical presentation,both Chinese and American video PSAs tend to adopt three modes: image,language and sound.Specifically,Chinese video PSAs tend to use image and written modes,with spoken symbols as an important complementary tool;American video PSAs construct meaning mainly through image and sound modes.However,there are differences in the sound modes collocation between the two countries: the sound modes in Chinese video PSAs are inconspicuous and are only an auxiliary tool for constructing meaning;the background music in American video PSAs is usually accompanied by lyrics,which helps express metaphorical meaning.The differences between Chinese and American video PSAs are mainly reflected in the different thematic categories of concern.Chinese PSAs focus on social morality,collectivist ideology,and cultural and traditional themes;American video PSAs focus more on the maintenance of individual rights,individualism,and personal competition.In addition,American PSAs employ more confrontational metaphor types,accounting for 14.2% of the total,while China rarely involves them.In terms of the choices of source and target domains,both Chinese and American video advertisements tend to choose OBJECTS,EXPERIENCE,CULTURE and ANIMAL,especially the first three.Second,structural metaphors and ontological metaphors exist in both Chinese and American video PSAs,with life scene metaphors accounting for the largest proportion,53.5% and 47.6%,respectively.The source domains of multimodal metaphors are mostly concrete,perceptible and familiar life scenes,and the target domains are mostly abstract concepts as well as emotional states.By using a large number of life scene metaphors,it evokes people’s attention to the serious environmental problems faced today,traffic safety problems and the inheritance and development of excellent traditional culture.In the mapping of dual domains,modal additions and subtractions,asymmetry of the mapping process,and partial mapping are produced to highlight the content of the source or target domains and help the audience understand the core idea of the advertisement.Finally,this thesis analyzes the factors affecting the similarities and differences of multimodal metaphors in Chinese and American video PSAs.The similarities are mainly due to the explanatory power of life scene metaphors,the role of multiple modalities,the common pursuit of truth,goodness and beauty,and the idea of“people-oriented”.The differences are due to the differences in values,history and culture,and traditional philosophy between China and the United States.For example,the frequency of human activity metaphors in American video PSAs(23.8%)is much higher than that of Chinese PSAs(5.3%),because American culture believes that human beings are above nature,and human activities are supreme.This thesis further confirms that metaphor is a basic human way of thinking,which is not only embodied in verbal media,but also widely presented in non-verbal media.This thesis uses conceptual blending theory to analyze the use of multimodal metaphors in video PSAs,which confirms the applicability of conceptual blending theory in the discourse analysis of video advertisements to a certain extent and increase the audience’s understanding of the accuracy and comprehensiveness of video PSAs.Through a contrastive study of multimodal metaphors in Chinese and American advertisements,we comprehensively analyze the cognitive construction process of multimodal metaphors and the similarities and differences between them,providing a newer,more complete and three-dimensional perspective and corpus for studies on conceptual blending,multimodal metaphors and video PSAs.In addition,the contrastive study of multimodal metaphors in Chinese and American video PSAs provides designers of PSAs with cognitive linguistic ideas,methods and materials,which are useful for the improvement and enhancement of PSAs.However,this thesis still has some limitations and needs further in-depth exploration.